Native Americans in the Contiguous US - Directory of Cultures and Histories - Happy Thanksgiving!

In elementary school or preschool, children first hear about the American First Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims and the Friendly Indians. The legend is not the complete truth, but an introduction nonetheless to human development, discovery, and migration as well as to Indigenous Peoples in North America. Thanksgiving is often a point at which children learn about Native Americans.

The legends and propaganda that have grown up around the Plymouth Colony First Thanksgiving are inaccurate when compared to 17th Century white settlers' handwritten diaries held in museums around the Eastern US. They also do not reflect the fact that the Spanish held Thanksgiving in the South before the English attempted it in the Northeastern US. Finally, it does not reflect that the Native Americans held thanksgiving celebrations and ceremonies regularly during many months of every year for 1000s of years into the past.

For a special National Geographic film about the harrowing life the settlers of Jamestown led in 1607, please visit this link: The Real Story of Jamestown.

The national Thanksgiving Day was changed to the 4th Thursday in November to allow more Shopping Days Before Christmas by President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the lobbying efforts of the F & R Lazarus company in Columbus OH and others. Soon thereafter, Black Friday boosted seasonal sales, ushered in with Christmas Parades on Thanksgiving Day (Macy's New York) and the day after (Columbus OH and others).

Put it all together and you have America and its interesting assortment of National Symbols, the official and the popular. All are interesting and unknown to most schoolchildren.

• The settlers of Plymouth Colony were to have been transported elsewhere in the region, but were dropped off at Plymouth, because it was more advantagious to their sea captain.
• The settlers called themselves Saints and were poor people. They dressed in cheap brighly-colored clothing day to day. No black and white.
• The settlers brought barrels of beer with them, instead of crop seeds, flour, and other staples.

Portions of the First Thanksgiving day were cooperative and happy, but much of it was marred by the fact that the settlers who called themselves Saints and did not know what a Pilgrim was, brought beer to the New World instead of food and agricultural seeds. It was a combination of drunkenness and prejudice among a few that brought the days immediately after our first NE American thanksgiving to a tragic end (see the links below). See a barrel of the beer at this link: Your Thanksgiving Resource - Fact, Fiction, Food, and Fun

From about 10,000 - 12,000 BCE, when Indigenous Peoples had entered the New World across the frozen Bering Strait, to about 9,000 or 8,000 BCE, when they had traveled across the continent and took the Eastern Woodlands of what is now the Northeastern US and parts of the Midwest as their homes was a long struggle.

It had been a wilderness struggle, but a wilderness of plenty that they did not waste. When white settlers arrived, sought help, received help from, and in 1621 turned against the first Native Americans they met, it was unexpected and tragic. By the end of the American Civil War some 250 years later, massacres on both sides ended in the slashing of Indigenous populations to a fraction of their former nations, the forced march of natives back to the west , barefoot in the snow during the harshest winter of the century; and more tragedies on both sides. Southern and Southwestern US Native Nations had already suffered at the hands of other European settlers beginning in the 1500s. The history of US Native Americans is not as happy as our elementary school stage plays for Thanksgiving would suggest.

The best parts of the First Thanksgiving with the Indigenous Peoples can be preserved in our National Holiday, for children, but at some point, they need to know all the facts. Even then, they can celebrate, add their own traditions, and pass them on.  For example, The Ohio State University holds an Alternative Thanksgiving dinner with authentic dishes from 1621 every year.

The Contiguous United States or the Lower 48 contain many US Federally recognized Native American Nations, some State-recognized-only, and some non-recognized nations. State-only and non-recognized groups regularly apply for State or US Federal recognition in order to gain certain rights and financial benefits like minority scholarships. Regularly, new groups emerge that have not been addressed in historic or written materials anywhere. I find it difficult to stay ahead of the new emergence.

Some US States have approved organizations to seek out the history of Indigenous Peoples in their states and the current status of their descendents. For example, California is famously active in this work. New Mexico, Nevada and other Western and Southwestern States are prominent in this research, possibly because of the higher concentration of Indigenous populations in these staes when compared with the rest of the Lower 48 US.

The National Geographic and Smithsonian Institution in partnership with IBM, along with their human migration work, are gathering stories and other data from Native Americans and other Indigenous Peoples around the world in an effort to eventually document every indigenous group that exists and perhaps some extinct tribes. That is the website to read often for updates and new stories, more so than any book written -- with each edition, new groups emerge and make that edition outdated.

The Western States include a wide diversity of Native Americans and Metis, from those of the Pacific Northwest to those of the southern pueblo communities. Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, and Utah comprise this block of states. The indigenous peoples of the northernmost states are most like the Canadian Frirst Nations across he border.

In a simplistic comparison, the northern Native American groups tend to be more similar to Asian peoples and the central and southern groups more like those of Mexico, Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous communities in Central and South America.  

For this project, the US North Central States include North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Abutting Canada, this block of states share soime of the same First Nations Peoples of the northern plains and prairies.